He is best known for his 1888 travel book Travels in Arabia Deserta, a work in two volumes which, though it had little immediate influence upon its publication, slowly became a kind of touchstone of ambitious travel writing, one valued as much for its language as for its content. T. E. Lawrence rediscovered the book and caused it to be republished in the 1920s, contributing an admiring introduction of his own. Since then the book has gone in and out of print.

The book is a vast recounting of Doughty's treks through the Arabian deserts, and his discoveries there. It is written in an extravagant and mannered style, largely based on the King James Bible, but constantly surprising with verbal turns and odd inventiveness.

Among authors who have praised the book are the British novelist Henry Green, whose essay on Doughty, "Apologia," is reprinted in his collection Surviving. Green's novels arguably show some direct stylistic influence of Doughty's book, as noted by John Updike in his introduction to the collection of Green's novels Loving; Living; Party Going.[3]

The Jacksons hail Doughty's work as being exemplary of this access to meaning through the linguistic understanding he demonstrates in his diction, in the care he takes with his choice of words, which favors pre-Shakespearean English for reasons "fundamentally linguistic, rather than literary." [5] Whole sections of the Jacksons' book examine Doughty's linguistic care and thinking.

Doughty was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 25 January 1926 and his ashes placed in Bay 1 of the Cloisters (tablet 2610).

^Jackson, Laura (Riding) and Schuyler B.. Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays. University Press of Virginia 1997. (Introduction by Charles Bernstein)

^p. 58 Jackson, Laura (Riding) and Schuyler B.. Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays. University Press of Virginia 1997. (Introduction by Charles Bernstein)